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COVID's Deadly Clotting Spurs US Trials of 2 Blood Thinners
coronavirus
(Dreamstime)
Friday, 11 September 2020 06:33 AM
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U.S. researchers have begun two clinical trials examining the use of blood thinners to help Covid-19 patients avoid clotting that’s led to strokes, heart attacks and organ failure.
In one study, the National Institutes of Health will look at patients who are hospitalized, NIH Director Francis Collins said on a call with reporters Thursday. The second study will focus on people who haven’t been hospitalized. The trials are part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed effort to accelerate the development of Covid-19 treatments and vaccines.
Clotting incidents are “strikingly more prevalent” in Covid-19 patients in intensive care, with about 20% to 30% of them experiencing the problem, said Gary Gibbons, Director of the NIH’s Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which will lead the trials. Other intensive-care patients have clotting about 5% to 10% of the time, he said.
Gibbons said he expects to have answers from the trial in “months not years.”
Doctors noticed the clotting concerns early in the pandemic and have been using anticoagulants in various ways to attempt to help patients, Collins said. The trials will help doctors “have a clear sense what is the most beneficial way,” he said.
The link between Covid-19 and clotting appears to be with the endothelial cells that line the body’s blood vessels. These cells contain a protein that the novel coronavirus attaches to as it infects the body, including the lungs, heart and other organs, Gibbons explained in June.
Hospitalized patients will receive either low or high doses of the blood thinner heparin while those being treated outside of a hospital will get either aspirin, a blood thinner called apixaban or a placebo. Researchers will also look for common genetic traits among those who aren’t hospitalized that then develop complications.
Researchers previously assessed the records of more than 2,700 Covid-19 patients hospitalized at Mount Sinai Health System and found signs anticoagulants may help improve survival, according to a June paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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